Starfarers

by Poul Anderson

  “He told us he wanted a change of scene.”

  “It doesn’t make sense. Unless he’s broken inside.”

  “You care very much, do you not?”

  Dayan stood mute.

  Sundaram smiled now as a man would smile at his troubled young daughter. “Put your fears aside, Hanny. He has taken the deepest hurt of any of us. He—” After a few seconds: “He did speak several times with me. I may not reveal what he said, of course. But I can point out the obvious, which you in your own pain seem to have let pass by. Ricardo Nansen is an aristocrat. He does not readily bare his feelings. To come to terms with his grief, he wants a surcease, a time alone. The captain is never alone, always on call. I helped him arrange it with the Tahirians. I may have given him a thought or two to consider. He will return to us, also in spirit.”

  Dayan laid fist in hand and looked past her companion, hopeward. Finally she turned her gaze to him and said, “Thank you. I wish I knew better words, but thank you.”

  Sundaram bowed. “Shalom, Hanny.”

  The island lay solitary, the top of a midoceanic volcano. From its crater the slopes fell rough and bestrewn, hundreds of meters down to surf. Woods blanketed the lower reaches in bronze and amber. Flocks crowded the skies, swimming creatures lanced the waves. Winds blew mild, full of salt and fragrances. Nevertheless the island was uninhabited. A population kept well under the carrying capacity of the planet had no land hunger. Besides, the benign climate would not last, and meanwhile geologists foresaw eruptions. An aircar was a rare sight on these shores.

  One rested, a bright bubble, above the black sands of a beach, near a shelter. Nansen and a Tahirian stood outside.

  “(I am glad it was you who came to take me off,)” said the man on his parleur.

  “(Would you not rather it were Simon or, better, Emil?)” inquired Ivan.

  “(We bade our good-byes when we landed from the ship. They were—)” Nansen paused. The breeze ruffled his hair. Beyond the little quadruped who confronted him, sea tumbled blue, indigo, and white. Surf whooshed low, crumbling rather than breaking, with none of the violence he had seen along coasts of Earth.

  “(They are friends,)” he said. “(I always wished you, too, could be my friend.)”

  Stance, gesture, and sharp, gingery odor did not altogether reject him. “(That is difficult, after what you have done to my people.)”

  “(Those others do not see it as harm.)”

  “(No, many have not. But the lifetimes since you first arrived here, during which we were away at the black hole, have been less than serene.)”

  “(Everything seems peaceful.)”

  “(Yes, seemingly. Yet our society is trembling, old customs abandoned, restlessness rife. The very purpose of maintaining stability is in question. This latest flood of new information, new concepts that your return has brought, it will have consequences still less foreseeable, perhaps uncontrollable.)”

  “(Is it bad that possibilities open up?)” Nansen argued. “(I envy your race its nearness to the black hole. You can discover more than we today can imagine, thousands of years before we will be able to.)”

  “(What cost does progress bear?)” Ivan retorted. “(I have studied what you related of your human history. I witnessed the slaughter, aboard ship.)”

  “(Need it happen to you? Cannot you make choices as free as ours?)”

  “(I hope so. I realize you did not intend to disturb us. You could not know. It chanced, as the collision of a stray planet with Tahir might chance. The cosmos goes deeper than our minds ever will.)”

  Ivan was still for a span. “(I do not hate you,)” en admitted. “(I would even like to be your friend.)”

  Hand clasped hand.

  They let go. “(But you must not disturb us more,)” Ivan begged. “(Leave us to cope with what you have left us. Depart before you raise more discontent, more questions.)”

  “(I suppose we always will, wherever we are,)” Nansen wrote on his parleur as stoically as he would have uttered it.

  “(Yes, because your race is mad.)”

  “(Maybe. And maybe that is why we voyage.)”

  The wind blew, the waves ran.

  44.

  The Thyrian nation was loyal to Jensu and indeed provided the Governance with many of its best constables, but clan ties still counted. Thus it came about that soon after he received his commission, Panthos was posted halfway around Earth to North Meric, where he reported directly to the Executive of that continent, his great-uncle. Given the growing unrest there, opportunities for conspicuously useful service and consequent rapid advancement in rank should be frequent.

  “If you survive them,” cautioned the old man. “Rats’ nests of tribes, peoples, classes, religions, godknowswhats, scourings of wars, migrations, revolutions, conversions, history—much too much history, much too little of it ours.”

  Straight and trim in his new gray uniform, optionary’s bars newly gleaming on his shoulders, Panthos replied, “They won’t dare rebel, any of them, will they, sir?”

  “Not yet. Not in my lifetime, maybe not in yours. They hate each other worse than they hate the Coordinator. But they do riot. If we can’t keep that within bounds, it will stir up notions, and that will not be unwelcome to certain Jensui magnates— Never mind.”

  “I see what you mean, sir.”

  “I doubt you do, except very vaguely. Well, you’ll learn. Don’t expect any favoritism.”

  “I don’t want any!” Panthos exclaimed.

  Firix overlooked the breach of military manners, this time, and finished: “I’m far too busy for it. I will try to get you assignments suited to your degree of experience and to developing you as an officer.” His features unbent. “For your part, you’ll come to dinner this evening. I’ve no end of questions, family, the estates, friends, everything, even the animals and adapts.”

  In the course of the next year or so Panthos learned about homesickness. Telepresence was thin rations when you never had the bodily reality. Besides, a man was generally too tired at day’s end to make a call, which would have been at an inconvenient antipodal hour anyway. Or he had to attend some social function or he and his fellow juniors were taking their much-needed relaxation or he was playing with a joygirl or—whatever it was.

  He also learned that maintaining the Coordinator’s peace involved more than policing the Solar System.

  At first he was stationed safely in Sanusco, meeting few natives other than servants, purveyors, and gentry, Jensuized in greater or lesser degree. Going on patrol through the streets, warrens, and sublevels, he discovered that the inhabitants were not a picturesque, undifferentiated rabble but individuals, who belonged to ancient cultures and held by ancient faiths. This education was interesting, occasionally delightful, now and then dangerous. He acquitted himself well, acquired the basics of two important languages, and was put in command of a platoon. They went widely over the continent as need arose, to assist a garrison in difficulties or to apply their special skills directly.

  They went at last to Tenoya.

  Firix first gave Panthos an intensive private briefing. “It’s as nasty a hole as you’ll find anywhere,” the Executive said. “Aswarm with fanatics. Arods, you know. Nowadays their priests don’t preach insurgency, but they do tell and retell how their valiant ancestors resisted the Pacification, and it wouldn’t take a very hot spark to detonate the whole region. If this Seladorian business gets out of hand, that could just possibly be it.”

  Panthos frowned, searching a memory lately overburdened. “Seladorians? A cult, aren’t they, split off from Arodism, but peaceful?”

  The Executive scowled. “Peaceful in theory. In practice, unshakeably determined. And only partly Arodish. They’ve taken notions and practices from a wide range. Their prophet’s father was a Kithman who left his ship to marry an Arodish woman. That made them outcasts in her people’s eyes, and they had to move to Kith Town. She never felt at home there, and after he died young she returned to Arod
ia with her son. I can imagine the influences on him and in him. It doesn’t help matters a bit that in the end Selador was martyred.

  “Now the Seladorians in Tenoya have begun actively expanding their area of cultivation. That’s brought on conflict with their neighbors, which has brought on killings. Retaliating for several deaths, a band of believers has wrecked a number of robots belonging to Arods, and even some municipal machinery. Their creed has technophobic implications, and the extremists among them are mechanoclasts.

  “The city’s aboil. The garrison’s barely able to keep a semblance of order. A control team has to go in and attack the trouble at its heart. I’d frankly prefer a more seasoned man, but every one of them is engaged elsewhere. And this could be the making of your career, Panthos.”

  Ardency blazed. “Thank you, sir!”

  The session went on for a pair of hours. At the end, when they parted, Firix said low, “I wish it didn’t have to be you. Not that I don’t have confidence in you, but—your mother’s been my favorite niece.”

  “I’ll be fine, sir,” Panthos assured him. He snapped to attention and lifted his arm in salute. “Service to the Coordinator.”

  Firix’s response was correct but without fire. Perhaps he was thinking of that painted giggler who sat in the Uldan Palace.

  Panthos chose a slow transport for the flight to his destination. It gave him the time and the equipment-carrying capacity for direct mnemonic input. He arrived with some knowledge of the political situation and well-informed about the geographies. Nonetheless, what he saw from aloft struck him hard.

  Perhaps it was the westward desolation, a rain-gullied plain stretching farther than his sight, dust scudding between scattered shrubs and clumps of harsh grass. Eastward the land sank down to a former lake bottom. That vast expanse of moister soil was green, cropland and groves streaked with irrigation pipes and studded with units processing the materials the plants yielded. Attendant robots moved about; brief sparks flashed where metal reflected sunlight. After the throngs in Sanusco and other cities—and the castles, preserves, villages, and archaic human-worked plantations in their hinterlands—desert and sown felt alike forsaken. Thyria seemed light-years distant, a dream half remembered.

  Perhaps it was Tenoya, sprawling over square kilometers. Toward the center, folk and vehicles beswarmed the streets. Tenants filled cyclopean buildings once devoted to other purposes but not yet fallen. Small houses made from wreckage huddled beneath. Here and there lifted the bulbous spire that marked a temple. Three antique towers, refurbished, soared in graceful lines and pastel hues close to the fortified garrison compound.

  A haze blued the city core, dust and smoke, man sign. At night, Panthos knew, lights would flare hectic. But, more than the surrounding hectares of ruin and abandonment, this life shocked him. He thought of maggots in the corpse of a beautiful woman.

  Enough. He had work to do.

  The carrier set down in the compound. He led his men out, told them to wait, and reported to the summarian. “I suggest an immediate reconnaissance, sir,” he said. “We’re fully prepared, and in fact want some movement after all that sitting. It’ll familiarize us, and a show of force ought to make for a healthier attitude.”

  “I’m not sure,” the senior officer replied slowly. “Yesterday we got word that Houer Kernaldi is in town. We don’t know when he arrived. Maybe days ago.”

  The note of hopelessness, the acceptance of being pretty well bottled up within these walls, chilled Panthos. He kept his tone respectful. “Who, sir?”

  “You haven’t heard of him? Houer Kernaldi. Double name, you notice. A Kithman by birth, but a Seladorian convert. He’s been evangelizing and organizing for a good ten years, while maintaining connections with his kinfolk.”

  He must be a lonely one, Panthos thought. If he’d abandoned the star ways, what had he left but tiny Kith Town and the rare ship from outside? Well, there were his fellow believers here on Earth, few though they were. And his god—or Atman, Entelechy, Ultimate Motive, Meaning, whatever the word was in various languages. The Executive and the educator program hadn’t told Panthos much about that. They didn’t know much. “A troublemaker, then, sir?”

  “Not really, at least not by intent. He’s never preached sedition, and may well be trying to calm his followers down. It could have the opposite effect, as crazy as everybody in Lowtown is.”

  “I definitely need to meet him. Permission to go out, sir?”

  “I have orders to allow you broad discretion,” the summarian answered resignedly. “But remember, if you get into a broil, it may touch off general rioting, and if that happens, we may not be able to rescue you.”

  Panthos doubted the most besotted fanatic would care to attack a band like his. Still, he should avoid provocation. He took them through the main gate in close order and at a slow pace, not thrusting through the crowds but passing through, causing people to move smoothly aside, as a boat parts the sea.

  That was a wistful image. The summer sun burned in a bleached and empty sky. Shadows lay hard-edged. Heat seethed in air so dry that breath stung nostrils. It struck from walls, hammerblows. Stenches worsened with each step onward, unwashed humanity, rankly seasoned cookery, dung, offal, sometimes a dog or giant rat ripening in death. The natives clamored from shopstalls, shrilled at each other; the shuffle of their sandals mingled with wheel-creak from carts and blare from the occasional motor vehicle. They were mostly Arods, lean, of medium stature and light brown skin, black hair hanging braided, faces high in cheekbones and flat in nose and slant in eyes, men generally in dingy white gowns, women in layers of gaudily striped cloth. A lively lot, Panthos admitted; hands waved, feet hopped, mouths moved incessantly. Sometimes a gaunt yellow desert dweller or a tall ranger from the northern bottomlands came by.

  Briefly, Panthos felt lost—he, his troop, his civilization—among these and a hundred different foreignnesses around the globe, grains in a dust storm that blew on and on forever. Nonsense! He led the Coordinator’s men, constables of the Governance. Their two dozen embodied mastery.

  Always awesome were the Warriors, two and a quarter meters tall, identical in thick body and stony countenance: adapts, their genes shaped not for civilian service but for battle. The riflemen were generally more useful, being more flexible in their ways. The flittermen, little fellows who looked as if the apparatus on their backs would soon crush them, were the least impressive. However, if things turned jeopardous, suddenly jets would lift them off the ground, whirlyblades deploy, and the opposition find itself covered from above.

  Panthos marched in front, unarmored, bearing only a sidearm, the golden rings of Jensu on his cap like a target. That also belonged to the show.

  Eastward the streets zigzagged down, narrowing into lanes, pavement cracked and pitted, until the platoon was in shadowed canyons under a ragged strip of sky. Walls gaped with holes, revealing the detritus behind. Panthos reviewed his data. Here was Lowtown, where war and quarrying had uncovered the remnants of earlier cities—before Tenoya, Arakoum; before Arakoum, Cago. … If collapse had not choked a building or if people had grubbed it clear, they occupied it afresh, roofed the top and shuttered the windows with whatever materials they could salvage, peered out at the newcomers, came forth and trailed him in a flock that grew steadily bigger, noisier, more hostile.

  To them the constables were invaders. This quarter that they had made from ruins was itself centuries old.

  Paceman Bokta advanced to the optionary’s side. “They’re in an ugly mood, sir,” he said.

  Panthos nodded. “I can see that,” he replied. “And hear it and smell it.”

  “Reminds me of once in Zembu, before your time, sir, when we were putting down Migoro’s Rebellion. On patrol through a district kind of like this. I never found out what set ’em off, but in an eyeblink a howling mob was at our throats. We had to shoot our way clear back to cantonment. Left four good men behind, torn to shreds.”

  “Do you think we should withdr
aw?”

  “Well, no, sir, can’t do that exactly. We could turn at the next intersection and take the first upbound street after that. They’ll suppose we’re only making a quick survey.” Bokta’s leathery countenance had stiffened. Plainly, he didn’t like the taste of what he advised.

  “Do you know they will? These aren’t Zembui.”

  “No, sir. Maybe they wouldn’t get bumptious. I just thought I should take leave to mention it.”

  The veteran was no coward. Nor was a crack unit, forewarned, likely to suffer serious casualties. On the other hand, if they had to kill, the consequences could go far beyond serious. As never before, the loneliness of decision caught at Panthos.

  He mustn’t hesitate. “This may be our last chance to find somebody who’ll negotiate,” he said. “We will proceed.”

  “Yes, sir.” The paceman fell back into formation.

  As if to bear him out, a noise awakened ahead. Raw yelps echoed between walls, above a growl that took chilly hold of spine and scalp. The throng dissolved. Men, the fewer women, and the yammering urchins shouted, jostled, ran toward the racket, disappeared down the crooked passages. Emptiness loomed and yawned.

  Nobody was left to keep the platoon from returning to base, and return had become impossible. “Alert!” Panthos snapped. “Forward!” He broke into quicksteps. Boots thudded at his back.

  The canyon opened. He had reached the Seladorian purlieu.

  Another world. Another universe? Right, left, and behind, walls rose in their ravaged tiers like hills enclosing a valley. In front, afar, Panthos spied the lake bed, hazy green to the horizon. Green, too, were the terraces that descended intricately before him, but paler, the green of hardihood and frugality. These grasses, grains, bushes, and trees were not biosynthesizers, they were life in its own right, food for their cultivators. The single extravagance was flower beds, flaunting to the sun. Houses and utility buildings stood along paths, a layout planned for optimum use of space. They, too, were made from salvage, but sturdily and neatly, colored rose or yellow or blue.